About the Session
Join us for an exciting Facilitating Learning Online (FLO) session about a news literacy framework for educators and students. In these information-challenged times, this workshop will introduce the concept and benefits of including news literacy (e.g. Ashley, 2020) as a crucial element in the post-secondary teaching and learning environment. We will explore the news literacy framework, discuss why it is essential to 21st-century post-secondary learning and teaching, and provide an orientation to a new open education resource, a news literacy toolkit.
The session will be of interest to professors, librarians, and other educators who support student learning. It aims to give participants the knowledge and skills to better understand and engage with today’s complex media environment. By the end of the workshop, participants will:
- Be able to define and explain the concept of news literacy and its importance in the current media landscape
- Understand how the presence of bias in news reporting affects the representation of events
- Learn strategies to curate a diverse and balanced news diet, avoiding echo chambers and ensuring exposure to multiple perspectives.
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This session may be recorded, archived, and shared after the event.
About the Facilitator
Justin Harrison has over 20 years’ professional experience as an academic research librarian and holds the position of Engagement & Learning Librarian at the University of Victoria Libraries. He is also a PhD candidate in the Faculty of Education at the University of Victoria, focusing on media literacy, news literacy, and their intersections with civic engagement and political polarization.
About the Panel
GenAI is now part of the everyday reality of post-secondary education. Educators across B.C. are navigating a mix of curiosity, concern, as well as fatigue as they decide how, or whether, to engage with these tools in their work to support teaching and learning. This panel brings together sector leaders, educators, and researchers to explore how we might move beyond simple “ban or embrace” narratives towards rethinking teaching and learning with GenAI with particular focus on human-centred approaches and open pedagogy.
This panel will be moderated by Helena Prins, an Advisor on the Learning + Teaching team.
Registration Coming Soon
This notice is to inform you that this session may be recorded, archived, and shared after the event.
About the Facilitators
Gwen Nguyen is a Learning + Teaching Advisor with BCcampus. Gwen holds a PhD in education studies from the University of Victoria and a MA in applied linguistics from Saint Michael’s College. Recently, Gwen has developed a keen interest in exploring pedagogical approaches that ethically and creatively integrate AI into teaching and learning. Gwen comes to this panel to set the stage, bringing a GenAI-literacy-in-teaching lens grounded in her work at BCcampus, where she has been observing the tension between resistance and reimaging education while developing support channels for educators, including the open access BCcampus GenAI in Teaching and Learning Toolkit and related initiatives.
Dr. Neil Fassina took on the role of President at Okanagan College in April 2021, inspired by the college’s reputation for transforming lives and communities. Dr. Fassina earned his PhD in Management from the Rotman School of Business at the University of Toronto and holds a BSc in Psychology from the University of Calgary. He is recognized as a Fellow Chartered Professional in Human Resources (FCPHR) and a Chartered Director (ICD.D) through the Institute of Chartered Directors. He has contributed to numerous refereed articles, co-authored a Canadian Human Resource Management textbook and enjoys speaking about the future of education and its role in economic and social development. Before joining Okanagan College, Neil served as President of Athabasca University from 2016 to 2021. His previous roles include Provost and Vice President Academic at the Northern Alberta Institute of Technology (NAIT) and Dean of the JR Shaw School of Business and School of Hospitality and Culinary Arts. Throughout his academic career, he has taught at the University of Toronto, the University of Calgary, the University of Manitoba, and in executive education programs.
Elizabeth Childs is a professor in the School of Education and Technology at Royal Roads University. She has worked in government, industry, and academia and consulted nationally and internationally. She is interested in the design, creation, and implementation of flexible learning environments that incorporate the affordances of technologies and provide learners with increased access, choice, flexibility, and opportunities. Dr. Childs’ research interests include online and blended learning, open education and open pedagogy, online learning communities and digital habitats, socio-emotional learning and immersive professional development, design thinking, and participatory design approaches.
Sharon Stein is an Associate Professor of Higher Education and Professor of Climate Complexity and Coloniality in the Department of Educational Studies at the University of British Columbia. She is the author of Unsettling the University: Confronting the Colonial Foundations of US Higher Education, and a co-founder of the Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures Arts/Research Collective. She is focused on an inquiry about the possibilities of earth-aligned AI for education – that is, AI that can help scaffold a transition from reductionist, anthropocentric learning toward relational intelligence and planetary responsibility.
Jessica Rizk, PhD, is a Senior Research Associate at the Conference Board of Canada. A former K–12 teacher and current post-secondary educator, she leads national research on education, workforce development, and AI literacy, focusing on how institutions and educators can adapt to an AI-enabled future. Her work bridges research, policy, and practice, bringing a perspective centered on equity, innovation, and preparing learners for the evolving demands of work and education.
About the Sessions
In this FLO (Facilitating Learning Online) Pod (Practices of Online Development), we will consider the impact of AI on education through a lens of relationality, asking questions such as:
- How might AI-use affect our relationships?
- How might it change the ways we connect with, and relate to, other people or to other living or non-living entities around us?
- What kinds of relationships might we form with AI tools, and how does that differ for those who choose not to use them?
- How might engagement with AI shape how we see ourselves, our capabilities, and our agency in the world?
Join us for a three-part series of exploratory conversations on AI and relationships, each with a different focus:
- February 11, 2026: Human-to-human
- February 25, 2026: Human-to-technology/AI
- March 11, 2026: Human-to-self.
Through guided prompting, thought-provoking questions, and short activities, we will reflect on and share ideas about AI’s impact on relationships. We will play with the idea of the cyborg, acknowledge the potential breakdown of rigid boundaries between human, non-human and machine, and the implications for education.
Each conversation will take place two weeks apart, with opportunities to stay engaged asynchronously between sessions. These sessions will raise more questions than provide definitive answers and are an opportunity to reflect on human and non-human relationality through choices of whether, and how, to use AI in education.
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This event will not be recorded.
About the Facilitators
Christina Hendricks is a Professor of Teaching in Philosophy and the Academic Director of the Centre for Teaching, Learning, and Technology at the University of British Columbia. She participated in generating institutional guidelines on generative AI in teaching and learning, and has contributed to some resources for faculty on generative AI. Over the last year she has begun to explore various topics under the broad umbrella of AI and relationships, and is looking forward to discussing these early ideas with participants in this FLO Pod.
Dani Dilkes is an Educational Developer and academic researcher whose work focuses on inclusion in higher education, complexity, and exploring socio-material entanglements and their impact on social experience. She leads the generative AI programming at the Centre for Teaching and Learning at Western University, approaching this through a complexity lens. She developed the Domains of AI-Awareness Framework, which acknowledges the affective or emotional nature of generative AI discourse and is excited to further explore this relational impact in conversation with others in this FLO Pod.